Hi Ray,
Contact McCabe Automotive Restorations, in Mundelein Illinois. Skip McCabe is a vintage Ferrari restoration specialist and has bone LOT'S of Giulia and Giulietta spiders to extremely high standards. Much will depend on exactly what you want them to do, so a phone call to Skip is best. Tell him I sent you.
If you bring a good shop a stripped-car (i.e., bumpers, trim, lights, interior, etc., etc. removed), the car is basically straight and doesn't require a lot of metal work or rust repair, your goal ought to be an Alfa factory period-correct, single stage enamel paint-job. Somebody who knows a lot more about this than I do once explained to me that there's about 40 hours of shop labor in an "easy" job like this. (On the other hand, a shop doing a 100 point concourse paint might spend 40 hours on just one panel.) That's not including materials, which are now pretty expensive. One way to really save money is to avoid the now ubiquitous "bare-metal" re-paint. If the car's original paint surface is in sound condition it doesn't need to be stripped off the car and can, in fact, provide an excellent base for the new enamel paint.
Yep. Some areas don't even allow enamel to be sold, I'm told. so a urethane would be a good second choice. Also, shops now like to use 2 part paint so it's sometimes hard to find someone who's accustomed working with single stage enamel. They're out there but you have to look to find them. That said, I think a properly done single-stage enamel on an old Alfa just looks more period "right". I always stop and do a double-take when I see an old Alfa painted that way. Enamel is durable, too. My 44 year old Rosso Amaranto factory enamel on my Super compounded beautifully and looks really good.
Single stage is any paint that doesn't use a clear coat (2 stage is a base color and clear). The problem with a base/clear on vintage cars is that all of the gloss frequently appears to be "on the surface".
Enamel is only slightly better than lacquer for durability
You made a good point above about bare metal paint jobs. Good OEM paint, properly sanded, is an excellent substrate.
Osso's estimate is right on target. Materials alone will run $2,000. The pros aren't crazy about spraying over someone else's prep work, especially a hobbyist so be prepared to get some push back and cost increases...
My experience for a high-quality paint job starts at $15,000. There is ALWAYS something that needs to be done. Plus, do you want to paint the outside to perfection and have ugly wheel wells, engine bay, and underbody? Passenger compartment and dash?
$15k minimum. $25k is easy to reach.
Or, you can fool yourself that a perfection paint job can somehow be done for a "good driver" price. Folly. Good-driver quality starts around $7,500 without the underbody, wheel wells, engine bay, and interior.
My friend who passed on such good advice, worked out of tin-sided pole-barn. He wet the floor of his "spray booth" (which wasn't) and turned out 100 point, national concourse winning restorations.
You can be low-tech and still get good paint. Sorta makes a good case for learning to do this yourself, I think. Our friend Gigem75 has done just that. Mike taught himself to do bodywork and paint. Working in the fastness of far east Texas, he's turned out some really good looking Alfas.
I'm having a hard time imagining paying $25,000 just for spraying color on a shell. That's a few hours of labor. At those rates I could have my lawyer do the painting and my bodyman keep me out of jail...
Ha, I think the $15,000 - $25,000 is based on lots and lots of time dissembling to bare metal and body work absent gallons of body filler and then multiple coats of very high quality paint. The cost isn't in the spraying, it is what you do before that which is the expensive part (as you know).
My '64 Spider was done in 1980 and still looks wonderful !
Also, chips and scratches are easy to touch-up. If you were to look closely at the cars nose, you would swear it never had a rock chip.
Actually, I put 40,000 miles on it since 1980 !
Look for a skilled painter. Old guys can work quicker, for less $$ and do a remarkable job.
You should be able to get a very nice driver paint job for $5k.
I need to reinforce some comments. It is my sincere belief that there is no such animal as a "rust-free"--750 or 101 Spider shell. It has to do with the design construction with sealed (almost) areas in the initial build. These cars rusted in these unfinished areas before they were complerted! The phrase "Rust-Never-Sleeps" is well applied to these cars, as it only gets worse with humidity and time. I've cut open enough good ones, back in the day, and over time, to be sure of this. Again, they were never intended to last 50+ years! As such, all of us are just preservationists, recreating what was in restoration. A good painter will address some of these issues. Never inexpensive work. It takes TIME to do it right.
I had my MGA stripped & painted for ~ $5000. I brought them a bare shell, I had done all the rust repairs and hammer/dolly work. They sandblasted some of the interior structure and hand stripped (machine sanding) the body to avoid the warping that sandblasting can cause. It is a base coat/clear coat in 'Chariot Red'.
Since this is a race car I opted not to do a lot of final polishing of the paint. The cost would have been almost double if I had them polish it to a show car level. Thus the paint is not concours perfect but fine for a driver or race car.
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